Businesses on Carta (FKA eShares) digitally distribute shares of their company to employees and investors. These shares, also known as securities, are a percentage of ownership in that company, and therefore hold monetary value.
The process of accepting a security is universal to all Carta users. An employee begins by signing up for an account, accepting a security, and creating a portfolio to contain that security and all future stock items.
I joined the team as one of three product designers working closely with engineers, customer support representatives, and business leads. I was excited to solve problems on a team which shipped meaningful new features quickly in weekly sprints. As I got acclimated to the product, however I took note of some issues.
The Million-Dollar Onboarding Problem
New user onboarding takes place cross-platform over email and web, includes an secure code for confirmation, and involves multiple parties. When we realized that the number of support tickets labelled “Security acceptance” and “secure code” were growing in tandem with the number of new companies signing up, we knew we had a problem on our hands.
Understanding the Problem
The sheer number of support tickets was getting out of hand. Customer support representatives were spending valuable hours each week addressing points of confusion in the onboarding flow, resulting in up to 300 tickets a month. I sifted through recent tickets to get a better understanding.
Research Round 1: Support Tickets
Among the tickets were some consistent questions, as well as some unique situations. From these questions we organized some key insights:
“Which email has my secure code?” — Users were getting confused by the various emails we were sending.
“Can I use Carta with my personal email address instead of my work email address?” — The issuing employer was not on the same page as the receiving employee.
“Can I forward this security acceptance to someone else?” — Handoffs were occurring without our knowledge.
Research Round 2: User Interviews
In order to better understand the problem, we followed up with users. Walkthroughs were set up with new companies during which we kept a close eye on interactions between companies and employees through Carta.
As a long-term employee I‘ve received equity as an incentive. Our CEO recently mentioned that we’d be moving onto Carta so I checked out the site. I created an account and confirmed my email… now it’s asking for a security code? How do I move my shares onto my account? What can I do on here?
Most of the criticisms of the process fell into 4 categories:
A lack of trust — Much of the confusion arose from employees not knowing what to expect from using a new product.
Nothing to do — Many curious employees would sign up and hit a dead end, without a security to accept.
Poor communication — The language of emails and landing pages was inconsistent and often unclear…
Unpredictable timelines — …As a result, emails were overlooked, buried in employees’ inboxes and forgotten over time.
Auditing the Original Onboarding Flow
It’s helpful to understand what the original onboarding flow looked like, as there were essentially two overlapping tasks: confirming the new user’s identity, and confirming the security itself. Because of this, emails and steps were getting lost in communication.
Our Solution
Our guidelines for success was a clear, controlled line of communication between issuers and recipients. This would help solidify Carta’s position as the middleman and limit unpredictable edge cases. Quantitatively, we wanted to see less of a correlation between new user accounts and security acceptance-related tickets.
1. Overhaul the Email Onboarding
Many users’ first interactions with Carta was via email notification, so we completely overhauled the entire emails archive.
We redesigned and standardized all emails to have a clear topic in the headline and a single call to action.
Following this was to address the concept of the secure code, which Carta uses to match a new user account with the correct security. Users were consistently confused by the tasks they had to accomplish as they switched between email and web.
We included a headline generated by the secure code to inform users why they were on the site, and pre-filled any form fields with any information we knew based on the security issued.
First impressions matter. Investing in branding would help people trust Carta as a brand.
2. Improve Key Onboarding Pages
The web pages were also changed to include a similar headline, pre-filling information gathered from the token in the email. If the email recipient clicked on the CTA, we knew who they were and what they were doing on eShares, and greeted them accordingly.
3. Reward a Completed Onboarding Process
Finally, a celebratory confirmation email would be sent to the new user who had completed the onboarding and security acceptance process. From here, the new user would be automatically linked to the issued security, and would proceed to create a portfolio to contain it.
Can stock certificates be exciting? We think it’s important to use design to make an otherwise painful experience fun.
Exploration and iterations
We experimented with different ways of introducing employees to the platform. This exploration raised a fundamental question: Should Carta remain open to all users? Or should we exude the gravitas of other financial brokerage institutions?
An open Carta experience would allow anyone to use the platform by creating an account and portfolio, building anticipation toward the opportunity to populate it with securities.
Taking a more typical financial institution-like approach meant limiting non-customers’ exposure to our platform but would limit the various edge cases that arose from neglected accounts. In this case, the unique code would serve as an invitation to start using Carta.
We decided on the latter option as it not only aligned with the company’s future vision, but also addressed many pain points early on in the process and would prevent problematic edge cases down the road.
Conclusion
Preliminary validation studies were conducted with the customer success team and proved to be a much more effective workflow, with positive feedback from both new and existing users. We are currently keeping an eye on the quantitative metrics to confirm the effectiveness of this design.
As mentioned, first impressions are important. The onboarding process, a common and universal experience, is too often overlooked. But I’ve realized and appreciate how much insight one can glean from polishing an MVP product.
